‘Ever been to Camp David before?’ This Katzenbach had inquired as the helicopters rotors began to quicken ahead of the relatively short hop to northern Maryland. Camp David was situated only slightly less than seventy miles north-north-east of the White House; even from across the other side of DC it was only a thirty to forty minute flight up to the Catoctins.
Watson had grimaced.
‘No, I’ve never been invited before.’
Not so much a wind of change but a firestorm was blowing through John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s badly mauled Administration. In part this was a virtue born of necessity but it also reflected a spirit of angry defiance, revealing an underlying steeliness in the character and personality of the Chief Executive which very few of his closest confidantes had suspected him capable. A steeliness and a positively stunning grasp of the things that pragmatically, had to be done to preserve both the Administration and the Union in the aftermath of the Battle of Washington and the scattered — nonetheless dreadful — outbreaks of violence across the rest of the country. The random atrocities continued, day by day even though the rebellion in Washington had been brutally stamped out by forces loyal to the flag.
In Washington it was now known that Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his Deputy, George Ball had been killed at the Main State Building. Rusk had been gunned down seconds before a huge truck bomb had shattered the C Street NW facade of the State Department. Ball had also probably died in that explosion although his bullet-riddled body had later been recovered from the wreckage. C. Douglas Dillon, Secretary of the Treasury had been gunned down outside his home; and Postmaster General John A. Gronouski had been badly injured — apparently an inadvertent victim of a wayward A-4 Skyraider strike — while attempting to hide in an office block close to Newsweek’s Washington Bureau. Among other casualties, Under Secretary of the Navy, Paul Burgess Fay, had been killed in the fighting at the Pentagon. Across Washington what survived of the governmental, military and political infrastructure a terrible game of ‘wait and see who turns up’ was being played out to establish who had and who had not survived the bloodletting.
Bloodletting was the only word for what had happened.
The latest estimates indicated that some three to four thousand people had been directly involved in the ‘rebellion’. People were calling it an ‘insurgency’, and attempted ‘coup d’état’ but ‘rebellion’ was as good a word as any to describe the unparalleled national disaster of the Battle of Washington.
Millions of Americans had perished on the night of the October War; but nothing had so dishonoured and corrupted the sense of one nation united against its travails, as the hideous disfigurement wrought upon the idea of America by the ‘rebels’ during forty-eight hours of mayhem on the streets of the District of Columbia. Even now there were enclaves of zealots and fanatics who refused to surrender; holed up in Arlington National Cemetery desecrating the memory of America’s hallowed fallen, and in office blocks and hotels, and down deep in the tunnels of the Metro. The bastards even had an FM radio station broadcasting a mixture of pseudo-Christian ultra-fundamentalist bile that would have sat well on any Grand Inquisitor’s lips, and what sounded like quasi-religious white supremacist racist claptrap.
Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation conceded that it was significant that although people of color had been involved in widespread rioting in the city on the second and third day of the ‘rebellion’, there had only been a handful non-whites among the nine hundred and seven-four — many had only surrendered because they were too badly wounded to carry on fighting — suspected ‘rebels’ thus far detained as of sundown yesterday.
The United States of American had been brought to its knees by an unholy alliance of Klansmen, backwoodsmen, religious nuts and psychopaths brought together in common cause by the agonies of the October War, the imbecilic treatment of the military after that war — at least a third of the ‘rebel’ prisoners still wore their old dog tags — and a criminal failure of leadership by the Administration of which Nick Katzenbach had once been proud to serve.
The President greeted Katzenbach and Marvin Watson on the steps of his cabin. Propped up in a chair with his heavily bandaged right leg elevated on a carefully arranged pile of soft cushions, Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy waved at the newcomers as they came in out of the cold.
“Forgive me for not getting up,” he apologised, quirking a boyish grin.
Katzenbach and Watson were the last two men to arrive for the hurriedly called ‘fireside conference’. Already present was General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps and presently the Military Governor of the District of Columbia; Albertis Sydney Harrison, the Governor of Virginia, and John Millard Tawes the Governor of Maryland.
“I am pleased to be able to announce that Marvin has accepted the position of Acting White House Appointments Secretary,” Jack Kennedy announced, introducing Watson as the supporting cast took their seats in armchairs around a spitting, guttering hearth. As always the President was solicitous of a newcomer’s unease in the company of virtual strangers. Although both Harrison and Tawes were Democrats like him there was a yawning chasm between aristocratic East Coast old Democrats like them and the brash young pretenders in Texas. Moreover, the Democratic Party was and had always been a ridiculously broad church, accommodating Oil Lobby Texans, die-hard segregationists like Harrison and liberal-minded conservative like Tawes who had already recognized that the Southern Civil Rights Movement was in the long term, unstoppable.
The civilities concluded and the pots of coffee refilled, the cabin cleared and the main players awaited their President’s pleasure.
Nick Katzenbach, who had known both Kennedy brothers for many years and considered himself an insider and a family friend, guessed that this was more than a straightforward ‘meeting’, and that his President’s purpose in calling the gathering was not simply to ensure that everybody in the room was ‘on the same page’. As if to confirm his suspicion Jack Kennedy gave himself a little longer to gather his thoughts and to taste the moods of the other men in the room.
He smiled that mischievous, deprecating smile which had charmed America back in 1960 in exactly the same way that Richard Nixon’s leer had not in Marvin Watson’s direction.
“FDR called this place the USS Shangri-La,” he chuckled. “That was in 1942. Most of what you see around us,” he waved a semi-regal arm, “is built on the footprint of a camp built by the Works Progress Administration in the thirties as a camp for federal employees. It occurs to me that in our current situation we can learn a thing or two from all those New Deal agencies FDR set up in another time of trial?”
The men around the President nodded warily.
“FDR and Winston Churchill met here in 1943,” he went on. “Nobody seems to know if it was actually in this building but this apparently, was Roosevelt’s cabin.” He shrugged. “So who knows? Dwight Eisenhower came here at about this time of the year to convalesce in 1955 after he had had a heart attack earlier in the fall.” Again, there was a suggestion of self-deprecation in his tone. “It is comforting to remember, now and then, that not all my predecessors were men of iron.”